Technical Field
This disclosure generally relates to the field of plasma physics, and, more particularly, to methods and apparatus for heating and/or compression of plasmoids.
Description of the Related Art
There is no question that the world's demand for energy will only increase. The advancement of virtually every modern society parallels the availability of copious, low-cost energy. The tremendous change that has been made to the Earth's atmosphere, and the potential looming climate catastrophe, are a consequence of the fact that energy was obtained by the consumption of staggering quantities of fossil fuels.
The attractiveness of fusion as an energy source is well known and has been pursued as an energy source worldwide for many years. However, the entry of fusion as a viable, competitive source of power has been stymied by the challenge of finding an economical way to heat and confine the plasma fuel.
The main challenges to plasma heating and confinement are the complexity and large physical scale of the plasma confinement systems and associated heating systems. The more massive the system required to confine and heat the fusion plasma, the higher the cost to develop and operate it. One decision by the majority fusion research community that drives the scale higher is the community's selection of the tokamak embodiment for plasma fuel confinement.
The tokamak embodiment leads to large reactor sizes due to the low ratio of the plasma energy to magnetic energy and the need to operate at steady state (low power density).
The research community has also expended great effort at the other end of the energy density spectrum, pursuing fusion at extremely high energy densities. Here, minute fuel pellets are compressed to fusion conditions by a large array of high power lasers. In this embodiment, the efficiency and complexity of the fast laser energy delivery systems become the problem, particularly the ability to rapidly and repetitively pulse these lasers to achieve reasonable levels of power efficiency.
For magnetic systems, the threshold size of a steady state fusion reactor required to achieve ignition and offer a safe protective shielding will always be quite large. Unlike fission, where the first commercial reactor was 50 MW, a demonstration fusion reactor must start operation at multi-gigawatt powers.